Which button blows up Cleveland?

I've never been a digital native.  My first computer, in 1995, was a dummy terminal in a shared household. I paid five bucks a month to have access. The terminal had a black screen with green letters and no graphics. The internet was via a large mainframe somewhere in the bowels of downtown Portland, and communication was slow and very primitive by today's standards. But it was fascinating to be able to communicate with people from all over the world.

When I moved out of that household and into an apartment in spring 1997, I had to get my own personal computer. Friends with skills raided the dumpsters behind Circuit City at Jantzen Beach, and cobbled the mismatched parts together into a sort of Frankentower that had minimal graphic capabilities (this was 1997-98, remember, so computer graphics were still in the Neanderthal phase anyway).  When my friends sat me down in front of it, I asked, "Which button blows up Cleveland?" and they laughed. But I was serious. I didn’t want to press a button that would undo everything they had put together for me, because I wouldn't know how to put it back myself.

It had a dial-up modem and ran Windows 3.1 while everyone else had moved on to Windows 98, so I never got spam and I never got hacked. It was slow, but so was I, and I was gloriously happy. Six months later when I went back to college to finish my degree, I found janitors throwing out a bunch of dot-matrix printers, toner cartridges and paper. I asked if I could help myself, they said sure, and I loaded up my bike trailer with a printer, four toner cartridges and three boxes of printer paper. I was set for at least a couple of years, all for free.

I took that computer to grad school in the fall of 2001, and used it until I crashed and burned out of grad school. At that point, in February 2002, it was cheaper to donate it to a school than to ship it home. 

Upon my return to Portland, I went back to the bike industry and no longer needed a computer for professional purposes. So over the next decade, I burned through a successiuon of donated computers from friends who were constantly upgrading; switched from PC to Mac (which I found more intuitive and visually-oriented) and got more comfortable with things over time. As long as I could just turn it on and go, I was mostly fine.

By 2013, I was working with a Mac Book, but things grew steadily more complex. 

I never updated the operating systems on my Macs. It seemed like Apple was issuing updates and whole new operating systems like every other week, and I would just become nominally comfortable with The Way Things Were when it would be time to update or change the operating system altogether. I did it once, was SO stymied by the differences -- new! bigger! better! faster! and everything is in different colors and shapes to boot! -- that I stopped changing systems.

On my current Macbook, which I got three years ago, I am still working with Catalina, copyright 2020. I simply loaded everything from the external hard drive when I got the new laptop, and voila! I was back in action.
So far, everything seems okay.
Except that the Microsoft Office Suite I had with my previous laptop has sort of expired, and now I can't use it. I think that's what happened, anyway.

But it doesn't matter a whole lot, since I've never learned how to use the tool bar in Word. And I've never had to make a PowerPoint presentation, so whatever.

Meanwhile, I had also gotten into iPhones. a friend gave me her outdated iPhone 4 in 2015. Then in 2019 it stopped working with all the apps or whatever, because the apps have constantly been splitting and updating like so many ameobas. So while my i4 slowly creaked to a halt, someone gave me an iPhone 6 in 2019, and I've been using that ever since.

Now, mind you, I've never used it like a phone. I can't afford a mobile phone account with a smartphone, so I've basically just used it like a pocket iPad, hopping onto free wifi whenever I'm out of the house and need to message Sweetie about something. If someone needs to call me, they can leave a message on the answering machine that comes with our landline at home. (I'm sure if I'd had a kid things might be different. But I didn't, and they're not. So we still have a landline.)

Sweetie, being a professional freelance writer, basically LIVES on her computer. So she's a lot harder on the hardware than I am, and she has to get her computer fixed or replaced more often.
Today, her computer did the cockroach, and the repair shop rented her a laptop to use while they retreive her stuff off the old computer. She brought the rental home, and I spent over half an hour trying to find the wifi password to our home network on my computer. It took me basically forever to find it, by which time she was out the door taking the rental back. I found it five minutes after she left, called the repair shop and asked them to let her know. Then I took a screenshot of the info and emailed that to her so she'd have it always.

But the fact that it took me almost 45 minutes to find a damned password should tell you something about how I get along with computers. When I switched to a laptop, it took me a week to remember how to find "System Preferences." It took me literally three years to remember how to find my password keychain in the damned thing. This is because, unlike the majority of computer owners in this world, I almost NEVER go looking under the hood. I simply do not open the little gray windows that get you inside the Big Brain of this thing, because what if I hit a wrong button and finally blow up Cleveland after all?

At this point in my life, having never needed massive computer skills for employment, I'm content to stick with the things that feel the most intuitive to me, like taking and sharing photos and videos, surfing the web for information and posting on social media (though I avoid Twitstorm and TikTok like the portals to damnation that they are). That is more than enough for me, and if I never learn how to format a thing into another thing, the corporate world can take a hike.

Because honestly, computers just shouldn't this damned hard to run.